The Curse of Frankenstein

The trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein promised cinema audiences a thrilling slice of action involving a man who, so the dramatic voice over promises, ‘revolted against nature’ and who had ‘experimented with the Devil and was forever cursed’. The trailer showed scenes of a bandaged figure lying in the midst of antiquated (by the standards of the 1950s) laboratory equipment, and of a well-dressed man informing an equally dapper companion that ‘we’ve discovered the source of life itself’. The monster itself was only very briefly glimpsed in the trailer, ensuring that audiences would have to buy tickets to see the film in order to witness the full horror.

The action in The Curse of Frankenstein is told in a flashback by a series of reminiscences by Baron Frankenstein, waiting in a condemned cell to be guillotined, to a priest brought to hear his confession. His story begins shortly after the death and burial of his mother the old Baroness Frankenstein, who has outlived her husband, the old Baron, and leaves behind her son. The son, (played by Melvyn Hayes) is still a teenager and is a brash and precious boy, barely capable of even the most basic civilities to the members of his family gathered for the funeral. He has engaged a tutor, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquart) to instruct him in anatomy and the natural sciences. Krempe remains the Baron’s tutor as he grows to adulthood and the adult Victor Frankenstein (now played by Peter Cushing) and his tutor have been working of experiments intended to restore life to dead tissue. They have success in reviving a dead puppy.

However Krempe is perturbed by where Frankenstein wishes to take these experimental insights. Krempe had assumed that their work in suspending and restoring life could be used to improve surgical techniques and intends that they should present a paper at a scientific academy. The Baron has other ideas: he intends to construct and bring life to a human body. He tells Krempe that ‘It’s no longer sufficient to being the dead back to life. We must create from the beginning. We must build up our own creature.’ He commences a series of robberies from gibbets, tombs and charnel houses to assemble the parts he needs to create a body. These include the corpse of a gibbeted criminal, hands from a master sculptor and eyes from a charnel house. Stitched together, suspended in an eerie liquid and chemical concoction in a tank, and blasted with electricity during a storm, the creature comes to life.

By this point Frankenstein and Krempe have parted company, Krempe concerned not only by his former pupil’s ambition to play god and create a living man, but also by the increasingly illegal methods Frankenstein was employing to get body parts. This lawlessness culminated in the Baron’s quest for a brain. Determined to have a brain of fine intellect and life experience in his creation, Frankenstein murders an eminent scientist, Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth), steals the brain from the crypt and implants it in the creature. While all the scientific work has been taking place, the Baron has become engaged, but keeps his laboratory locked and his work that takes him to the charnel house and cemetery separate from the civilised life he leads with his fiancée, Elizabeth (Hazel Court). He is also keeping secret that he has been having an affair with his servant Justine (Valerie Gaunt), who is now pregnant.

This narrative occupies the first half of the film. A turning point is reached when the creature awakes prematurely due to a blast of lightning activating the electrical equipment in the laboratory. The director Terence Fisher vividly captures the shock of its birth and first movement. Victor leaves the laboratory to fetch help but the amniotic fluid in the tank begins to drain away, visually suggesting the sand in an eggtimer running out as genesis approaches. Hearing noises, Frankenstein returns to the lab, pushes open the door and the creature turns to face him. Fisher uses a jarring and unnervingly jagged zoom from an over cranked camera to the creature’s face as it turns and the bandages fall away from its face, ramming home the shock that Frankenstein feels as the camera tracks through the door and into the room (Collins, 2012). The Baron and the audience simultaneously see a pasty white face with a milky dead eye, horrific scarring and a violent leer. The creature is hideous when it was to have been handsome, mute when it should have been eloquent, and most of all violent when it should have been cultivated, a fact shown when it promptly attempts to strangle the Baron.

Thereafter the film moves briskly as the creature escapes, is hunted and is shot in the eye by Krempe. Buried in the forest, the creature is retrieved by Frankenstein and taken to the laboratory. It is revived by the Baron but is brain damaged and murderous. It has already killed a blind beggar and his grandchild and now kills Justine, the Baron’s pregnant servant. Having pursued Frankenstein’s fiancée to the rooftop of their chateau, the creature is set on fire by the Baron and shot, falling down into a vat of acid that dissolves its body. The creature’s disappearance in the acid leaves no other suspects for the death of Justine except Frankenstein, and the film’s action resolves back to the cell, with the Baron telling his story to the priest. It ends on this irony of the Baron being led to the guillotine for a crime he only indirectly committed, by virtue of having made the creature. As a bell tolls, the camera remains focussed on the guillotine blade and the closing credits roll.

Why make a Frankenstein picture in 1950s Britain? The place to look for the answer to this question is Bray Studios in Buckinghamshire, a few kilometres outside London. Bray Studios were set around Down Place, an elegant white country house set in very extensive grounds, and had been a film studio since the 1930s. By the 1950s it belonged to Hammer Film Productions. The interiors of the Baron’s house and laboratory were filmed inside Down Place, and the exterior scenes, including Cushing scaling a gibbet to cut down the corpse and the creature killing the beggar and his grandson and then being hunted and shot, were filmed nearby in Black Park in Buckinghamshire.

A core body of executives and creative personnel set upon an adaptation of Shelley’s novel, which began principal photography on 16 November 1956 and wrapped on 24 December the same year. The working atmosphere at Bray Studios has been so well documented and described that this atmosphere remains palpable nearly 60 years later, especially the sense that came to dawn on cast and crew that they were working on something special. At Bray a close-knit team of technicians, some of whom had worked together earlier at the equally close-knit Gainsborough studios, were joined by a small repertory of actors to make this film. Their work would have been a novelty to many of them. It was in colour, it was pushing the envelope to the absolute limit in terms of the level of violence and sexuality that the British Board of Film Censors would allow, and above all, it was a horror film.

Despised by critics, prohibited by censors and local authorities and shunned by studios, there had only been a handful of horrors in Britain before now. A tiny number of silent British films had contained elements of horror (Brown, 2013). A few more horror films were made following the introduction of sound, including 1933’s The Ghoul, 1936’s The Man Who Changed His Mind, 1939’s Dark Eyes of London and 1945’s Dead of Night. For Dark Eyes of London, one of Hollywood’s fading horror stars Bela Lugosi had come to England to make the film. The first two starred Boris Karloff, an actor and horror star who was British but whose career and therefore his major horror appearances were made in Hollywood productions. But now at Bray Studios, horror had ‘come home’. Hollywood horrors had been contingent on British source novels, but British film makers themselves had not regarded this literary heritage as suitable source material for movies.

Nothing in their early output suggests that the Hammer name would become a byword for gothic horror or the company a major commercial success, and the films prior to 1957 were an eclectic bunch of movies from detective stories to attempts at noir to science fiction and melodrama. None of them was particularly distinguished or important and were mostly modest B features, just as the Hammer films of the 1930s had been ‘quota quickies’ made to satisfy government demand for native British films. This circumstance changed when the studio achieved commercial success with science fiction features The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass 2, and X the Unknown, during the mid-1950s. The first two of these were adaptations of successful BBC science fiction serials written by Nigel Kneale that Hammer made into popular films (popular that is with everyone except Kneale, who hated what Hammer did to his work) and X the Unknown was a science fiction thriller by Jimmy Sangster, who also wrote the script for Curse.

Then in 1957 Curse film performed impressively at the British and American box office and recouped its production costs more than 70 times over (Hearn, 2011: 15) as well as performing strongly in both the West End and in regional theatres (Meikle, 2009: 41). The box office returns made Hammer’s executives realise they had a winning pattern on their hands, and a sequel, Revenge of Frankenstein, and another gothic horror, Dracula (both released in 1958) were soon in production, the former using Cushing again as the Baron and the latter reuniting Cushing and Lee (with Cushing as Van Helsing and Lee as the Count), all directed by Terence Fisher.

Terence Fisher died in 1980 in relative obscurity; few newspapers carried obituaries, either recounting his life or, more significantly, attempting to locate the director and his work in any meaningful frame of reference that might make sense of his career and impact. Before his death he had received academic attention in only one major text, David Pirie’s landmark work Heritage of Horror (1973). But since Fisher’s death, and more particularly in the last twenty years, he has received extensive attention from film historians and theorists, including biographies by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Peter Hutchings, study of the religious themes in his works by Paul Leggett, as well as descriptions, evaluations and accounts of his career and life in general studies of Hammer by Meikle and Johnson and del Vecchio, in Pirie’s pioneering academic study of British horror cinema, and in works in British directors and the British film industry (Hutchings 2001; Leggett, 2002).

The Curse of Frankenstein receives attention in all these works. In the most positive assessments, Fisher is considered an auteur, a director with a unique creative vision which imbues his oeuvre with particular and consistent artistic qualities. At the other end of the spectrum Fisher is written off as a hack and a plodder who made derivative and uninteresting films. Somewhere in the middle we can try to locate a vision of Fisher who was a late-comer to the film industry in general and to directing in particular (he was a merchant seamen before working in the film industry and once described himself as the ‘oldest clapper boy in the business’). He was in the right place at the right time when Hammer’s executives decided to make a gothic horror in 1956 and who was put in charge of a team of industry professionals with years of experience. Viewing the films that Fisher directed from Colonel Bogey in 1947 to Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell in 1972 (released 1974) reinforces his competence and the professional standard of his work. By the time the cameras started rolling at Bray in 1956 Fisher was ready to apply what he had learnt in another studio, Gainsborough.

Right from the start the remarkably vigorous quality of the team’s work was obvious; the first scene filmed was the Baron cutting down the hanged robber from the gibbet and Cushing performed the dangerous climb to the top of the gibbet prop himself. The same level of energy carries through the entire production. A palpable sense of excitement among the actors and technicians squeezed into the small studio spaces at Bray still registers, reaching out to us across the decades. The team making Curse was harmonious and the cramped working conditions at Bray were homely compared to the vastness of Pinewood, Borehamwood, Ellstree or Shepperton. The close-knit arrangement was encouraged further by the crew being bussed into Bray and home again each day. Black and white photos of the behind the scenes action convey the cosiness of the working environment. In one remarkable image, Lee in his monster make up and with fake blood down his face is getting a cup of tea from that most British of things, the tea lady with her trolley. The crew had worked together before and would do so again; Sangster and Fisher had worked at Hammer on a number of B features before collaborating on Curse. According to the autobiography of leading man Christopher Lee, there was a vibrant atmosphere on the set, and the original five-week period that the company allocated for filming was extended to six when the managing director realised ‘that we were onto something and the ship mustn’t be spoilt for a ha’p’orth of tar’ (Lee 1997: 251). Production schedules and budgets had to be extended, but the early rushes convinced executives to make the effort (Dixon, 1991: 226).

The team behind the cameras was close-knit one; so too was the team acting out the drama in front of the cameras. Cushing was quite a catch for Hammer, after successes he scored on television playing Winston Smith in the BBC’s 1984 (a dramatisation savaged by appalled critics but which was a major hit for the BBC in terms of audience and which won Cushing a BAFTA), as well as Mr Darcy in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1952. Christopher Lee’s date with destiny, and the beginning of his career in horror cinema that has placed him in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most prolific actor, came about because he was tall enough to be the monster. It could just as easily have been Bernard Bresslaw playing the monster, but Bresslaw was soon to be busy with another long-running British cinematic success, the Carry On films. The rest of the cast were reliable theatre and film performers. Hazel Court, playing the Baron’s fiancée Elizabeth, had made a name for herself in period drama and science fiction films, including the unforgettable 1954 thriller Devil Girl from Mars. The Scottish actor Robert Urquhart came into Hammer’s orbit from wartime-set dramas such as Yangtse Incident (1957), and after Curse went right back to that sort of film, appearing as reliable supporting player in Dunkirk (1958), 55 Days in Peking (1963) and other worthy historical dramas. Valerie Gaunt stepped out from humdrum police drama Dixon of Dock Green to play the vampish maid Justine. Such is the small-scale, claustrophobic inner world that Fisher creates, that this quintet of performers Lee, Cushing, Urquhart, Court and Gaunt, account for virtually the entire cast. There are a handful of subsidiary roles (the priest, the Professor, the blind old man, the comedy relief drunk Burgomaster and his censorious wife) but mostly the film plays out its length just with focus on these four people and the monster.

One change in particular registers on the screen from Hammer’s successful science fiction films X the Unknown and the Quatermass as well as the earlier celebrated adaptation of Shelley’s novel directed by James Whale for Universal Pictures in 1931: The Curse of Frankenstein is in colour. Not only is it in colour, it is made and processed in Eastman Color, which shows up in lurid glory the dark red. As Arthur Marwick points out, in 1957 the vast majority of British films were still being made in black and white, meaning the colour of the horrors on the screen stood out strongly (1991: 74).

Eastman Color is a relatively cheap film processing method, and it is one the many cheap aspects of the film. £64,000 is not a great deal to spend on a film, even by the standards of 1956. In some ways this budgetary restraint shows on screen, but in others it is remarkably well hidden. It shows in that except for the framing scenes in the Baron’s jail cell and the brief chase sequence filmed in Black Park, the action almost never leaves the Baron’s chateau and its upstairs laboratory. The contrast with contemporary horror films made at larger studios is instructive; 1959’s The Flesh and the Fiends was made at Shepperton and is an expansive film, showcasing large sets and street scenes of nineteenth-century Edinburgh. Sangster’s screenplay for Curse drastically condenses Shelley’s novel, removing not only characters but the immense transcontinental pursuit of the Creature by Frankenstein that ends on the Arctic. Frankenstein’s visits to London, Scotland and his inadvertent trip to Ireland (when he is washed up on the shore after floating adrift from a Scottish island) are all missing. So too are the periods of study Frankenstein enjoys in Ingolstadt. Sangster’s narrative rarely moves beyond the dual worlds the Baron inhabits, the respectable world of the downstairs which he shares with his fiancée and with polite society, and the upstairs world of bio-mechanical science filled with acid and infernal machinery.

The limited budget shows in other ways. The cast is small and there are almost no extras. There is certainly no torch wielding mob familiar from other adaptations of the story. Many of Shelley’s original characters are lost, from Frankenstein’s father, brothers (including his ill-fated younger brother who is murdered by the monster) and friends, the professors at Ingolstadt, the three De Laceys who live in the cottage and who have a terrifying encounter with the creature, the Irish magistrate who exonerates Frankenstein of a murder charge, and above all Captain Walton, the intrepid seafarer who encounters both Frankenstein and his creature in the Arctic ice and nurses the dying scientist on board his ship. The sets are also small, although scenic designer Bernard Robinson, cinematographer Jack Asher and director Terence Fisher make the most of the angles afforded by the cramped but interesting interiors at Bray.

But in other ways the budget’s limits are extremely well hidden, not just in the deceptively spacious scenes captured by Fisher’s camera. Even by 1956 British cinema had a long tradition of period or costume drama, a point I’ll return to later. On screen, this experience shows in the immaculate costume and scenographic design. None of this looks especially authentic or accurate, and what is meant to be Switzerland in 1818 looks like England from the previous century. However what is missing in terms of strict historical accuracy is made up for in the well-appointed and detailed sets. In Baron Frankenstein’s downstairs and respectable world, he and his fiancée entertain guests in their drawing room. The Baron drinks brandy, smokes cigars, wears a velvet smoking jacket and their meals are lavish affairs. Upstairs the laboratory, while an ugly and technological space in contrast to the gracious domestic comforts downstairs, is also well-appointed. The talented and resourceful Bernard Robinson decorated the set with genuine antique laboratory equipment (Miller, 1995: 49). He also included small but telling details; a skull sits on a side desk, while red fire buckets with water hang on the walls, prefiguring the fiery climax. A large Wimshurst machine that activates glowing red lights is a centrepiece and used to reanimate the creature, as its dual wheels spin and (real and ridiculously dangerous) electrical charge builds up and crackles. To listen for a heartbeat the Baron used an authentic wooden tubular Pinard stethoscope. Overall Hammer’s team managed to disguise their budgetary limitations to a remarkable degree in their sturdy and even lush evocation of period interiors.

Regardless of how happy the cast and crew were making the film or how good it looked, these points did not register with the critics in both Britain and America who saw the film on release, although the critical commentary from the British critics was the more trenchant. People could first see the film when it opened at the London Pavilion on 2 May, 1957. Readers of the Sunday Times were informed by film critic Dilys Powell that she was unable ‘to defend the cinema against the charge it debases’. Similar terminology appeared in the Tribune: the film was ‘depressing and degrading for anyone who loves the cinema’. One of the best known reviews oft-quoted in writings about Hammer was Derek Hill’s in Sight and Sound which opined the film presented details ‘immediately reminiscent of concentration camp atrocities’ (cited in Cooper, 2011: 31). Executive producer Anthony Hinds was quoted in The Times as being ‘undismayed by being called (to quote his own words) “a monster, a ghoul who exploits the basest, most degraded tastes in human nature for personal profit”.’ (cited in Fox, 2013). But reviewers blamed the director, not the producer. In The Daily Worker the critic R. D. Smith singled out Terence Fisher as responsible for ‘splattering the screen with blood, gory sacking, human eyeballs torn from their sockets, amputated limbs’ (cited in Miller, 1995: 67). Not all reviewers took the film so seriously and Hutchings points to a body of reviews that lightly mocked, such as the Financial Times’s opinion that horror films were eccentric light entertainment (Hutchings 2004: 85). In fact not all reviews were negative and some reviewers actually enjoyed the film; some were even frightened (Dixon, 1991: 234).

Viewers of much more recent horror films from The Loved Ones (2009) to the examples of the burgeoning ‘torture porn’ genre such as Saw or Hostel would find little horrific in Fisher’s very stately film. Fisher keeps almost all the gore off screen, just below the edge of the visible shot. A great deal of the violence is only implied as well. Three murders are committed in the course of the film; the old blind peasant, his grandson and the maid Justine are all killed by the creature. Viewers do not see any of these. We hear Justine scream as the monster advances; the boy’s death is even more obliquely suggested. He wanders off screen in the general direction of the monster, and later Fisher’s camera pans down to the ground to show his satchel trampled into the dirt. It is sixteen minutes into the running time before Fisher shows anything at all gory, and this is the gibbet. Once the hanged criminal’s corpse is back in the laboratory there is a tantalising glimpse of the decomposing face, but Fisher’s camera quickly tracks up and the sight is gone. Fisher allows only the briefest glimpse of a scalpel before cutting back to the master shot (Dixon, 1991: 244). We hear a splash as the Baron drops the head in the acid bath, but the camera is trained on Cushing’s face and again we see nothing. Fisher’s adroit use of suggestion rather than display defines the film. At about 30 minutes in, the Baron invites Krempe to view his work, but the audience is excluded. Krempe recoils in horror from what is hidden behind a cloth, but the audience is left to guess. The most striking suggestiveness comes when Frankenstein buys the eyeballs from the charnel house. Fisher allows the viewer a very brief glimpse of the eyeballs in a container but then cuts immediately to a close-up of Frankenstein examining the eyeballs (which are out of shot) back in the laboratory. The Baron is holding up a magnifying glass which grossly distorts and expands his own eye. Without having to show the disembodied eyeballs, Fisher has compellingly indicated that the whole sequence is about eyes.² It is more than half way through the running length that Fisher shows anything really nasty, and that is the monster’s face. Fisher in fact took pains to ingeniously suggest rather than show. When the creature is shot in the eye, there is a very brief glimpse of blood, but more telling of the physical and cerebral turmoil is the effect of the autumnal leaves suddenly swirling and blowing around the creature, visually suggesting the dreadful damage the bullet is doing inside the creature’s brain. These impressions are conveyed by suggestion, not by explicitness. But what little gore there was, it was still too much for the critics in 1957.

Why did they hate it so much? Viewing the film in the twenty-first century it is hard to wonder what all the fuss was about. Not only has the horror genre moved into the torture porn realm, it has reached this point after earlier phases of development from the slasher horror, urban horror and sexploitation films such as the exceptionally controversial I Spit on your Grave (1978), Pete Walker’s mid-1970s output and the 1970s sub genres such the ‘women in prison’ films and nunsploitation. We also view Fisher’s film in the twenty-first century after the ‘video nasties’ moral panic of the early 1980s, which resulted in a large number of films being banned in Britain including Mother’s Day (1980) and The Burning (1981) as well as a host of Italian horrors (Kendrick, 2004: 162). All of these films make the implied and mostly off-screen surgical procedures in Curse of Frankenstein seem tame. As well, many developments in the horror genre have tended to eschew the period settings of Hammer, preferring contemporary and often urban settings, from Phoenix, Arizona in Psycho, to Haddonfield, Illinois in Halloween. The period setting of Curse can seem in contrast remote and the pace sedate.

But these later genres and trends all come in the wake of Curse of Frankenstein. Critics seeing it in 1957 were part of a film culture that privileged particular themes and outputs. A comment in the newspaper the Evening Advertiser from that year is revealing, asking rhetorically ‘Where would British films be without the Royal Navy?’ (Carney, 2013: 136). A survey of films released in 1957 and in the years immediately before helps put the venom of the critics into context and makes sense of the Evening Advertiser’s observation. British audiences and critics were used to a steady diet of worthy films such as 1957’s Yangtse Incident (the one commented on by the reviewer in the Evening Advertiser), one of many ‘stiff upper lip’ war dramas that proliferated on screen. Also in 1957 there came Ill Met by Moonlight and the highly regarded The Bridge on the River Kwai. Other popular cinematic types of the time were jolly comedies (Blue Murder at St Trinian’s and Doctor at Large also came out in 1957) and respectable period dramas such as The Barretts of Wimpole Street. These trends continued, suggesting the extent to which at its premiere in 1957 The Curse of Frankenstein must have seemed freakishly bizarre. The next year the Carry On series of amiable sex comedy films began with Carry On Sergeant, and in 1959 box office records were broken by Carry On Nurse (Ross, 2005: 26).

There were occasional horror films as well. Night of the Demon, a British-made film with an American star (Dana Andrews) and director (Jacques Tourneur), and now a cult favourite, appeared in 1957. But this film was in black and white, and was mostly subtle compared to what must have been the brightly coloured shocks of Frankenstein’s laboratory. As we shall see later in this discussion, Curse of Frankenstein was preceded by a sporadic but clearly apparent tradition of horror cinema, even from such unlikely sources as Abbott and Costello. In 1957, in Britain, however, the film burst onto screen amidst a large number of black and white, respectable, patriotic and very harmless British films. One film historian calls the 1950s output of the British film industry ‘constipated’ (Ashworth, 1996: 301). The term admirably sums up the moral safeness of films of the period, especially those made by the dominant Rank Organisation headed by the teetotal Methodist Lord J. Arthur Rank.

Some reviewers actively hoped to discourage people – especially young people – from going to see The Curse of Frankenstein. Dire warnings were all ignored as the film performed brisk business in Britain, the US and then in Europe as well. For an outlay of £64,000, or $270,000, the film made between $7-8 million. Among those seeing the film was John Carpenter. As an adult, Carpenter became a film director, producer, editor and musician. As a child he was captivated by Hammer’s film and its tagline ‘The Curse of Frankenstein will haunt you forever!’ Carpenter has since asserted the seminal influence of Fisher over horror cinema, not only in prompting outpourings of criticism against the genre but in the way Fisher carefully orchestrated his ‘sequences of blood and mayhem’ (Carpenter in Dixon, 1991: xi). In the years and decades since the film’s release, other directors from Tim Burton to Martin Scorsese have cited seeing Fisher’s films as a seminal childhood experience. Burton’s 1999 (and British-made) horror Sleepy Hollow not only included a cameo from Christopher Lee in a very Hammer-style role as a judge but was also assessed by many critics as a clear homage to Hammer’s style (Salisbury, 1999). Twenty years’ after Curse came out George Lucas drew much of the cast for Star Wars from the ranks of Hammer alumnus, most prominently Peter Cushing.

This box office success came both despite and because of the film’s X certificate from the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). The peculiar spelling of Hammer’s earlier feature The Quatermass Xperiment, not to mention their next science fiction feature’s title X the Unknown were entirely unsubtle references to the fact their films were deemed horrifying enough to warrant an X certificate, restricting an audience to people 16 years and over.

At least before Hammer came to boast in their titles about getting them, an X certificate (which had been issued since 1951) was normally something avoided at all cost, although the idea that a restrictive certificate would boost business was not new as the producers of Dark Eyes of London in 1939 had requested an H (for ‘Horror’) certificate for their film (Johnson, 1997: 159). The major cinema chains often declined to show X features and they were generally a mark of a disreputable product (Hutchings, 2003: 29). The X certificate existed simply because the BBFC needed something to label films deemed too frightening, sickening or generally unpalatable that they should only be seen by an age restricted audience. For any other film executive, an X certificate would have been a disaster, but James Carreras didn’t bat an eyelid and turned a mark of critical opprobrium into a marketing ploy. Carreras, was in no doubt that getting an X certificate meant that his films were instantly branded as disreputable. Indeed he was apprehensive when some years after Curse’s release the British Film Institute suggested organising a special screening of Hammer’s films, saying that Hammer’s success lay in not being respectable.³

Thus the film that critics attacked in such alarmist tones on its release in 1957 came out with an X certificate from the BBCF, meaning that its audience was age restricted and it came with a reputation preceding it, as a work deemed horrifying by Britain’s censors. We should not overlook the implication of its certificate when reading these reviews. Having an X certificate meant that Curse was in its own way cursed. Critics were primed to see in it degenerate film making. But, and this is a big ‘but’, the X certificate did not carry through on its normal implications. As I said, often major cinema chains would decline to show X features and this level of classification could restrict not only audiences but profitability. This was not the case with Curse. It pushed past these restrictions and gained an audience.

A school of thought suggests that any publicity is good publicity but can we tie that point in to the reception of The Curse of Frankenstein? While the producer Anthony Hinds was happy to tell The Times that he didn’t care if people thought he was a ghoul, not all of the production team were so relaxed. In an interview conducted in the 1970s and thus many years after the film’s release, Terence Fisher recalled how upset he had been by the vitriol directed at his film and at him. This after all was a quiet, respectably married Christian man who was appalled by the scene in The Exorcist of the small girl playing Regan masturbating (Nicholson). While he could exploit mild doses of sex and violence, Fisher was far from being the depraved pervert reviewers suggested he was and has even been derided for his conventionality (Hutchings, 2001: 13; Harmes, 2014: 102).

There is more to being thin-skinned here: Fisher was right to be worried as the publicity which horror films generated could end careers. It is worthwhile moving forward just three years to 1960 where we find uncannily similar points of view being made against a horror film by the same set of critics, including the dangerously misguided Dilys Powell. The film is Michael Powell’s 1960 psychological horror Peeping Tom, about a humble film crew’s focus-puller who murders women and voyeuristically watches film he has shot of their death throes. Powell was, prior to 1960, an acclaimed film maker, responsible (in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger) for scores of films including A Canterbury Tale (1944), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). These films won positive notices and they also won awards. Peeping Tom meanwhile was critically savaged. Once more Dilys Powell was shocked by the depths to which British cinema had sunk with this ‘essentially vicious’ movie. In the Observer newspaper C. A. Lejeune (who had walked out of the pre-screening) reported that ‘It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom’ (cited in Gritten, 2010). Lejeune had earlier informed the Observer’s readership that Curse of Frankenstein was ‘among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered’ (cited in Miller, 1995: 67). Of Peeping Tom other critics asked ‘why, oh why…?’ in dramatic despair (Patterson, 2010).

The comments made against Peeping Tom provide important context and scope for the reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein. Clearly few horror film makers were likely to escape critical censure. But while almost every history of the Hammer studio, biography of Terence Fisher, and review of Curse has quoted the same highly critical reviews none, as far as I can judge, have reflected on the important distinction in the otherwise identical critical reception of Curse and Peeping Tom. The reviews killed off Michael Powell’s career, indicating that in some instances bad publicity is just bad publicity, whereas Curse was a career-making film for Fisher, bad reviews and all. After Peeping Tom Powell became an outcast, going from being a critically lauded and prolific director to a man whose career ground to almost a halt and who made few other films until he died in 1990 (Gritten, 2010). To put it in perspective it would be as if a critical savaging had destroyed the career of Sir David Lean or Sir Carol Reed. Fisher by contrast, while personally upset by the bad reviews, weathered the storm. Curse, critical savaging or not, made Fisher’s career. Powell was a highly regarded award winning director; Fisher was a non-entity with much less to lose but a lot to gain. Following his first gothic horror, Fisher embarked on an astonishingly prolific horror career making another 23 films between 1957 and 1972, most for Hammer. Curse also defined him: the self-described ‘journeyman director’ who had done anything and everything from science fiction to whimsical comedy developed from one film a coherence in his later output that has enabled critics and biographers to seriously claim auteur status for him.

The parallels are neat but the contrast is striking. There are important explanations for the varied fortunes of two horror directors who films had such a similar reception. Fisher was working for a company who didn’t care about critical savaging and actively courted it. James Carreras could turn a bad review into a marketing opportunity in a way few other British film executives could have managed. Fisher also had a studio infrastructure to back him up. After success with Curse, Hammer was not going to let him go, whereas Powell had so such repertory security to back him up. He was essentially on his own to face the negative reactions.

While almost all accounts and histories of Hammer have quoted these bad reviews, few seem to have gone further and thought in more sustained terms about what they may have signified and why Hammer’s film survived a critical mauling when others did not. Having moved forward to 1960, moving backwards to the 1940s further illuminates this same point. The negative not to say hysterical, reviews against Peeping Tom had been prefigured by the reactions (often by the same critics) to Curse three years earlier; but in turn the reviews of Curse had been prefigured by the comments made about another instance of mass film culture, the Gainsborough melodramas. The Gainsborough costume dramas (some of them made by Fisher working with crew including Jack Asher and Anthony Nelson-Keys) were trenchantly attacked. One critic found a Gainsborough film The Wicked Lady (1945) nauseating (cited in Cook, 1996b: 55). To critics they seemed to be in the worst possible taste. Gainsborough executives were unperturbed and one of them, R. J. Minney, unapologetically argued that ‘the commodity must be what the public wants’ (cited in Harper, 1994: 120). Like Carreras, executives at Gainsborough were prepared to weather the storm, confident that they had a commodity that audiences wanted and the films were generally box office successes (Cook, 1996b: 52; Petrie, 1997: 119). They also had a developing critical mass of product, Gainsborough with their costume cycle and Hammer with their gothic horrors. Peeping Tom was a one-off, not only because it ended Powell’s career but it had at any rate always been intended as a stand-alone. The film that Fisher was purveying was of a type with a long-standing and entrenched genre of costume drama.

Reactions to Curse have over the decades become more measured but in some ways things have not improved in terms of Curse’s reputation. Curse and then Hammer’s Dracula, released the next year, are the foundation of the company’s gothic output. They are both adaptations of major gothic novels and both spawned a long series of sequels. They were both also the results of the same creative stable, and actors from Curse including Cushing, Lee and Valerie Gaunt were all redeployed in Dracula, as well as having the same team including Fisher, Sangster, Asher, Hinds, Nelson Keys, Phil Leakey on makeup and James Bernard composing the score, all working behind the scenes for James Carreras. But a range of critical assessments almost always consign Curse to the lesser place, judging Curse as an experiment but Dracula as the consolidation and success. Peter Hutching’s judgment is in many ways typical of these assessments. Thus he believes that Curse is less cinematically adroit, its camera work and design less confident, James Bernard’s music is less impressive, the budget smaller than for Dracula (Hutchings, 2003: 36). The opening scenes seem ‘tentative’ in contrast to the opening of Dracula which is ‘brasher, louder, bolder, innovative, more confident, more cinematic’ (Hutchings, 2003: 37). In short, critical assessments such as these look at Curse strictly in terms of hindsight, as a modest beginning to the bigger and better films that followed and then to the less impressive films that Hammer kept churning out past their due by date.

These are by no means unique observations, but can have some correctives. In some measure there is truth in some of these points. Having experienced success with Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s executives wanted more of the same. Confident they seemed to have a property – gothic horror – that audiences wanted they were also prepared to splash a bit more cash at the next film, Dracula. But these modern critical assessments have a deleterious effect on Curse’s reputation as much as the critical mauling of the 1950s had. They obscure what made Curse so offensive but also so startling in the way it adapted from earlier texts. Locating Curse as a modest first effort can push into the background why it shocked and therefore why it also mattered. In the next chapter I turn to the nature of adaptation, with the Hammer company in general and particularly with The Curse of Frankenstein.